Cleaning Up Once Again

1. The storms are over after a last burst of rain early this morning, and we'll have a cooler, cloudier day today, the National Weather Service says. An isolated storm is possible this afternoon. The high will be about 81 degrees, and the overnight low will be around 60.

2. Weather Underground reports that East Cobb received nearly three-quarters of an inch of rain Thursday and more than half an inch early today for a total topping 1.25 inches. The winds and lightning did serious damage, toppling trees and power lines. Hundreds of Marietta Power customers in East Cobb were in the dark at times, although the company reduced the outages to nine homes in Northeast Cobb by 6 a.m. Georgia Power reported a peak of 216,000 customers without power at 8:30 Thursday night, down to 59,000 statewide and 52,000 in metro Atlanta at 6 a.m. The storm killed two people in Buckhead and one in Mableton. If you have photos or videos from the storm or reports of damage or cleanup you'd like to share, let East Cobb Patch editor Wendy Parker know.

3. Fortunately, East Cobb's high school graduations are indoors. (Pity , which was supposed to hold its commencement in the football stadium at 7 p.m. Thursday; the Powder Springs school .) Class of 2011 will graduate at the KSU Convocation Center today at 7 p.m. If you can't make it to Kennesaw State, you can watch it live online through the school district's website, then catch a photo gallery at East Cobb Patch this weekend. Be sure to check out our photo galleries from Wednesday graduation and Thursday ceremony.

4. Don't forget that the Cobb County government is closed today for the first of five budget-balancing furlough days and Monday for Memorial Day. If you're staying in East Cobb for the holiday weekend marking the unofficial start of summer, here are some of your options for commemorating Memorial Day and paying tribute to those who fought and died for our country.

5. If you are leaving town, you might want to get home by Tuesday afternoon so you can attend the Cobb County Board of Education's public forum on the fiscal 2012 budget at the Central Office on Glover Street in Marietta. The forum will start around 6:30 p.m. after a salary hearing at 6. And if you think from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and from the Georgia School Boards Association have taught the school board all it needs to know about openness, check out this report from the Marietta Daily Journal. It recaps a bizarre moment from the May 19 meeting when the board separated two names from the personnel report and held a different vote on them. The board and its attorney, Clem Doyle, went through a lot of verbal gymnastics to avoid identifying the two, new principals Joshua Morreale of and Susan Galante of . It was an amazing example of trying to maintain secrecy while making a decision that legally had to be done in public.